NB Although all of the great houses and historical figures are real, current period characters are purely from my imagination and have no link with anyone living or dead.

Part 5 Changes Afoot!

Tea that evening was fish and chips from the shop, finished with some of the left-over cakes with ice cream. We had another coach-load on Sunday, this time a service club up from London, hopefully a little more agile than todays’ lot. Tristan was now showering every evening in our bathroom before going over the road to sleep, His wardrobe and personal items now stored in one of the out buildings we didn’t open to the public.

Sunday we all did our thing again and it went down well. One odd thing was that the chap from NT was back with another couple of office types and they filmed us on two mobile phones as we went around. It didn’t bother me much and Tristan had no idea what they were doing so we gave out the information, got some laughs and generally must have made everyone happy considering the weight of the coins in the hat again.

Monday was my start to get a lot of things changed; now I had the new licence in my new name. Tristan and my parents spent the day cleaning the House and tidying the garden for next weekends’ visits. I made an appointment with a solicitor in Colchester to work on an official name change and I went around to all the places where I had been listed as Brian to say I was not Brian any more.

Alec and Stella came with me but Sarah opted to help clean the House – the first time ever! Most of the places were quite happy to make the change on seeing my licence but the librarian was not so helpful. Even showing her the clip of my change on Stellas’ phone was not enough so I got her to ring the police station and speak to the sergeant before she would issue me with a new library card. Ridiculous; a bit of cardboard that allowed one to borrow books was harder to get than a laminated licence to drive a deadly weapon!

The downside to this activity was that we were sitting in the local café having a break when a reporter from the local paper came in and made a bee-line for our table. He wanted to know if the story he had heard was correct and that I had changed sex by kissing a frog. We had to say that the story was right, having already told the police and several others in Coggeshall. One thing we had not told them was that the frog had become a teenage man from 1516, something the reporter homed in on when Stella showed him the clip to prove our story. He immediately wanted to interview Tristan but we pleaded with him to hold on until Tristan was fully able to be part of the world that he now lived in.

I said “How would you feel if you woke up and it was 2525 and a guy was shoving a microphone under your nose, asking how you found the world?”

We assured him that he would get full and exclusive access if he took it easy. I suggested that he come along to our tour next weekend because the story we told was true in every respect. He said that he would write the story about me being changed for the next edition so we gave him a potted history of Brian and the description of being changed. He took some photos of us on his phone and had me posing for a couple. He said that he could get the ‘before’ picture from my school photos which the newspapers’ photographer took. So much for privacy! I, for one, was learning more about the world I lived in since my transformation than all of the years I had happily been Brian.

The thing was that I could not keep my change secret and I could not pretend that I had transformed naturally as that would involve examinations, operations and a whole heap of government bodies; on top of a year or more to get through the process. No. the only way to explain the sudden change could only be magic or alien intervention and I thought that magic may be the safest way. Who would want to be known as a bloke who had been abducted by aliens and returned as a beautiful girl? Come to think about that, there are probably thousands who wouldn’t mind.

Tuesday my father took me to the University to have my course application changed. That was no big deal for them as they had dealt with transgendered students before. I still wanted to do history so it was just a matter of making sure my tutors knew who I was, or had been. While we were in the town we went to a couple of the bigger car yards to have a look for a car that I could use.

With the rise of electrics and the comparatively short distances I would normally travel we were looking for an older EV or hybrid which we could afford. The new ones were pretty expensive still but we did find a small Toyota Prius Hybrid a few years old that fitted the bill. My father had a test drive and I sat in the driving seat to see how I felt and, both being happy with it, he put a deposit on it so they could prepare it for delivery. Alec already had one similar in bright red and I had earlier wanted the same colour. However, the one I picked was in a light blue, much more the new me.

It would be registered in my name and I felt pretty good about that. Except for a house, a car in your name was a sure sign of growing up. Needless to say, when I started totting up the costs involved that I would have to stump up later on, it looked a little daunting. We had the appointment with the solicitor later in that afternoon so had a late lunch in the town before wandering in the shops for a while. My father bought me a lovely necklace and ear-ring set and kissed me on my cheek, saying “I may have lost a son but what I have gained will light up my life.” I teared up at that. The appointment went well, we had my police licence and paperwork from the University and he did not even ask how I had changed before preparing the submission for us, telling us that it would take a couple of weeks to be notarised and that he would send us the papers. My father paid the bill and we went home.

Wednesday we found out what the guys from NT were after. My father got a call in the morning and was asked if he, and the rest of us, could be available in the afternoon as they wanted to talk. Of course we agreed so were on tenterhooks until they turned up at the House. We met in the coffee shop with my mother putting on a kettle. There were a few cakes left over from Sunday as well.

The discussion started with them asking Tristan why he chose the name he gave at the start of our tour and Tristan answered “Because that is my name, sire, everything we tell you in our discussion is true.”

That, of course, led to having to tell them the truth about him. I had the clip on my phone that Stella had sent me so I showed it to them, saying that before I kissed the frog I was a boy called Brian. It took them a lot of time to get their heads around the story, especially the part where one of us was born around 1495, the illegitimate son of Henry Bourchier.

The fact that Tristan could tell them about life in the 1504 to 1512 period in the household at Little Eastern, or, as it was back then, Estaines Parva; was enough to convince them that Tristan was the real deal. This made them very excited indeed, as you can imagine, and one declared “This makes what we came for so much more real.”

That was when we found out why they wanted to talk to us. Our presentation was something that had been lost because of tourist guides becoming just that; older volunteer guides with some knowledge. Our first-hand presentation made it so much more real for the visitors. They had taken the clips that they took back to the office and shown them to all and sundry, creating quite a stir, or so they said. There was, in the pipeline, a grand opening of Little Eastern Manor, near Dunmow, a new acquisition for NT that had been given in payment of Inheritance Tax. This was to take place in July and they were planning a big event, possibly with royalty attending.

They had already engaged some younger actors from a local drama school to handle the presentation and tour of the current house which, although very grand, is two to three hundred years younger than where Tristan grew up. They had wanted us to open the show with a vignette of life in the earlier days and referencing the times that the Bourchiers’ lived there. Now, however, they could see more of an introduction to the whole area of land.

I had done some digging and found out that Tristans’ father, Henry, had been a member of the Privy Council to Henry the Seventh and was a very senior member of the royal court. His only living daughter, Anne, had married William Parr, brother to Catherine Parr, the last wife of Henry the Eighth. They had lived there until Anne left William Parr and Parr lost the land when he got into the bad books of the royalty.

Tristans’ grandparents were William Bourchier and Anne Woodville. William died in 1480 when Henry was about five or six. There was no male to rein him in when he started to feel his oats which was how Tristan came about when his Henry was in his early twenties. The real surprise was that his Tristans’ great-grandparents were very well connected.

His great-grandfather, Henry, the First Earl of Essex, was a Knight of the Garter and a great grandson of Edward the Third. His great-grandmother was Isabel of Cambridge, the aunt to Edward the Fourth and Richard the Third. The big house that Tristan had grown up in was totally gone now and the new Manor was some way from the site, built over the remains of an old hunting lodge. After Parr, the land had been reacquired then given to a Henry Maynard in 1590 by Queen Elizabeth the First.

Prior to the time of Tristan, however, the land was a favourite hunting estate that the Plantagenets’ visited often which was when Henry Bourchier and Isabel Plantagenet had got together. Actually, I should have said de Bourchier as that is how the family had been known for the generations that they lived in Halstead.

The discussion got fairly heated then and the upshot was that they wanted both Tristan and I, plus any others that we thought appropriate, to write and present a ten to fifteen minute presentation that will take the attendees on the start of their journey. We were told that professional script-writers were now preparing scripts that the other volunteers would present in the same manner as us; small groups for each era of the present house. The present house did have a lot of interesting history, not so much regal but more showbiz since the turn of the twentieth century.

We were given the date of the opening and told that all our passes would be posted to us once we had decided on how many we would need. Accommodation would be in the Manor itself and we should get there on the Saturday for the opening Sunday. Prior to that we would be expected to go and rehearse with the other presenters a few times.

I think we all got caught up in the excitement, my father itching to write our script, with my help of course, and Tristan was keen to see where he grew up again, not that there would be much still existing. Before they left we did tell our visitors that there would be a newspaper article about me next week with a follow-up about Tristan so we may both be celebrities by the time we arrived in Little Eastern. That it was just that easy!

Marianne Gregory © 2022